Memory Flashcards
Outline research into coding
Coding is the process of storing information into a memory store.
Baddeley: gave participants 1 of 4 lists of words. Acoustically similar/dissimilar and semantically similar/dissimilar.
When asked to recall the list immediately, participants did worse with acoustically similar words. Whereas, after a retention interval of 20 mins, accuracy was worse with semantically similar words.
Baddeley concluded that the STM codes acoustically whilst the LTM codes semantically.
Evaluate research into coding
Lab experiment - so higher internal validity.
Practical applications: eg revision techniques.
Artificial stimuli: low external validity, participant arousal etc
Used an independent design study
Different forms of memory not tested.
Outline research into duration
Peterson and Peterson:
24 participants given a 3 digit number and nonsense trigram. Participants were told to count backwards from the number to prevent mental rehearsal of the trigram. 80% of participants could accurately recall the trigram after 3 sceonds, this figuire decreased to 10% after 18s seconds. Peterson et al concluded the STM as a retention of 20-30 seconds.
Bahrick et al:
392 high school graduates.
When asked to freely recall names of students in their graduating class, accuracy was 30% in participants who had graduated 48 years ago and 60% for those who had graduated 15 years ago. During a photo recognition task, accuracy was 70% and 90%. This research suggests duration of the LTM is potentially life long.
Evaluate research into duration of the LTM
Peterson et al:
+ controlled
- artificial stimuli
Bahrick:
+ high ecological validity as used meaningful memories, opposed to artificial stimuli.
- no control over extraneous variables
Outline research into capacity
Jacobs: participants could retain a mean average of 7.3 letters and 9.2 digits during a digit span task.
Jacobs findings have been validated despite it being an older test, meaning it has temporal validity.
Miller coined the term chunking and said people could retain 7+-2 chunks of information at one time.
Cowan suggested this was an overestimation and the figure would be closer to 4.
Outline the MSM
Proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin.
Suggests that memories are formed sequentially and are transferred between stores in a linear fashion. Environmental stimuli enter the sensory register, any info which is paid attention to will be transferred into the STM. If rehearsal is not maintained this information will eventually decay and be displaced by new incoming info. If rehearsal is prolonged it will be transferred into the LTM where it can be retrieved.
Evaluate the MSM
Research support:
Baddeley’s research into coding identified that the STM and LTM are distinctively different, with the STM coding acoustically, whilst the LTM codes semantically. This provides supporting evidence for the memory containing seperate stores.
- most research support uses artificial stimuli
- Too simplistic: Tulving et al proposed that the LTM is comprised of 3 stores and the WMM suggests the STM is multifaceted and dynamic rather than a unitary store.
Outline the WMM
Proposed by Baddeley and Hitch as an alternative memory model which explained issues that the MSM couldn’t account for.
The working memory model depicts the working memory as a multifaceted, dynamic system rather than a unitary store where information is transferred in a linear fashion. The WMM focuses on active processing and storage of information, consisting of the central executive, phonological loop and visual spatial sketchpad.
Central executive: monitors incoming information, allocates data to the two slave systems and decides what information is paid attention to.
Phonological loop: one of two slave systems which deals with auditory information. Can be divided into the phonological store (holds words that have recently been heard and remembering speech in their temporal order) and the articulatory processing system, which repeats the series of heard words on a loop to prevent decay.
Visuo- spatial sketchpad deals with visual spatial info. Logie further divided this store into the visual cache (handles visual info) and the inner scribe (spatial.)
The episodic buffer was later introduced to integrate information across the three systems and into the long term memory.
Evaluate the WMM
More complex and dynamic than the MSM.
Research support by Baddeley and Hitch used dual tasks as evidence for the STM being comprised of multiple stores. Participants were asked to do two task simultaneously. Half of the participants did two acoustic tasks (eg remembering a series of digits whilst completing a verbal reasoning task). Whilst the other half did one acoustic based task and one visual task. As performance was poorer in the first condition, this impairment could be due to both tasks competing for the limited resources in the phonological loop, whilst the other participants were using the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad.
Patient KF suffered a head injury after a motorcycle accident. However, only certain aspects of his memory were impaired. KF struggled to remember sounds and acoustic information but had no problem with remembering visual information such as faces.
Limited explanation: excludes the LTM.
Outline the LTM
Unlike the MSM depiction of the LTM as a unitary store, Tulving suggests the LTM can actually be divided into 3 forms of long term memories.
Episodic - declarative memories which have a personal connection.
Semantic - declarative memories comprised of facts and knowledge of the world.
Procedural - implicit memories associated with movement.
Evaluate Tulving’s research into LTM
Case study:
In the case of Clive Wearing, the client was a professional musician and could play the piano without difficulty. However, he could not remember having learned to play after suffering a brain injury. This suggests an impaired episodic memory but functioning procedural memory.
Neuroimaging research:
Tulving had participants compete varying tasks whilst their brains were scanned using a brain scanner. The scans showed the left prefrontal cortex to be implicated in semantic memories whilst the right prefrontal cortex was implicated with episodic memories. The high internal validity of biological evidence provides reliable and unbiased evidence to support the idea of three separate types of long-term memory.
Real life applications: Beville researched a group of people with mild cognitive impairments. When comparing performance on an episodic memory test, the experimental group who had received memory training did better than the control group who did not. This suggests that by distinguishing between the different types of long term memories, provides psychologists with the opportunity to develop specific treatments to improve people’s lives.
Outline interference theory
When two pieces of information conflict, this can prevent retrieval. The more similar the two pieces of information are, the more likely failure of retrieval will occur.
Proactive interference: when old memories prevent retrieval of new memories.
Retroactive interference: when newer memories prevent retrieval of older memories.
Evaluate research into interference theory
Research support:
-McGeoch and McDonald studied retroactive interference by changing the amount of similarity between 2 sets of materials. Participants had to learn a list of 10 words until they could remember all of them. Then they learned a new list. The six groups learnt different types of lists. They found that the most similar material produced the worst recall meaning that interference is strongest when memories are similar
Baddeley and Hitch examined rugby players who had played every match in the season and players who had missed some games due to injury. The players were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played against earlier in the season. Baddeley and Hitch found that players who had played the most games forgot proportionately more games than those who had played fewer games due to injury. As this study used a real life scenario, this increases the ecological validity of interference theory.
Although interference research (proactive and retroactive) provides an insight into one type of forgetting, it only explains a specific type of forgetting – memory for similar information. Moreover, the majority of supporting evidence comes from lab experiments decreasing the external validity.
Outline retrieval failure:
When relevant cues are not available, preventing the retrieval of memories. Tulving et al outlined how if a cue is meaningful at the time of encoding it is needed for retrieval. (encoding specificity principle)
Context-dependent forgetting: Godden and Baddeley
Non-matching conditions produced results which were 40% lower in accuracy.
State-dependent forgetting
Carter and Cassady
Evaluate context and state dependent forgetting
Research support:
Dependent on the type of memory being retrieved. Godden and Baddeley replicated their original study but had participants do a recognition task, rather than a recall one. Accuracy was not influenced by changes in contexts which suggests that the presence/absence of cue only affects memory when you test it in a certain way.
Baddeley argued that for interference issues to occur, context differences have to be vastly different eg: on land vs underwater. As the context effects aren’t as strong in real life, this means that real life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues don’t explain much forgetting.
Real life applications: police can both mentally and physically reconstruct a crime scene for witnesses, enabling them to have the relevant cues which can prompt more accurate recall of the event.
